
Biography
I am a wheat bioinformatician with wet lab molecular biology and fieldwork experience. I typically develop tools and pipelines to analyse next-generation sequencing datasets for mutant identification, gene expression and comparative analyses and for epigenetic studies. I am primarily focused on hexaploid wheat with the goal of understanding key adaptive traits in wheat and their development.
At EI I am working in collaboration with colleagues at the JIC, the USA and Germany on an ERA-CAPS funded project to understand the epigenome of wheat. In this project we are sequencing the full methylome of Chinese Spring wheat and observing how polyploid genome formation affects genome methylation. Currently I am using gene capture to analyze methylation and SNP variation across a diverse landrace population of wheat (the Watkins collection).
Before joining EI I completed my PhD at the University of Liverpool where I largely used gene capture, mapping and SNP calling in hexaploid wheat next-generation sequencing datasets for mapping-by-sequencing mutant identification and epigenetic studies in elite wheat varieties.
Publications
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Investigating accidents on the DNA highway

Assembly line: making sense of metagenomics through MAGs

Celebrating 75 years of the National Health Service with groundbreaking research

Decoding Biodiversity: bridging the gap between data and discoveries.

Single cells offering limitless potential

Cellular Genomics: understanding why being different is normal

Bananas are on the brink but close cousins could save their skins

Healthy gut microbiomes defined by five signatures

Genomic resources to help boost climate resilience of fisheries

Engineered plants produce sex perfume to trick pests and replace pesticides

Human body a breeding ground for antimicrobial resistance genes

Key tilapia genome offers boost to global food security

Exotic wheat DNA could help breed ‘climate-proof’ crops

Sequencing project to unleash the huge potential of euglenoids
